Vermont chosen for national education initiative Bennington Banner MONTPELIER -- Education Secretary Armando Vilaseca announced Wednesday that Vermont was one of five states selected by University of Kansas researchers to implement a five-year,...

Jem Muldoon's insight:

Love this! Behavior, family engagement - and - academics are the focus.

Teachers who have the biggest impact on students have relationships with them. Core standards, rigorous testing, and other policy initiatives will do little to improve achievment before the connection between the teacher and the student exists.

Disrupting Education With Competent Kids, the Internet, and Experimentation Huffington Post Two years ago, Salman Khan took the stage at TED and completely upended my sense of what is possible when it comes to innovation around education.

Jem Muldoon's insight:

Author wonders, "What if, instead of transferring content from teacher to student, the role of the teacher was to provoke students with questions and to encourage but not directly instruct? What if learning took place primarily in groups, as students worked together to uncover content and solve problems using the Internet? What if the teacher, rather than evaluating learning, focused on admiring findings? Moreover, since we live in an increasingly broadband connected world, what if the teacher sat in New York while his students sat in rural India?"

Equity and excellence in US education policy The Hill (blog) The future of the American Dream depends on what we do at this decisive moment. As an educator of more than 30 years, I know the dream is first ignited in the classroom.

Jem Muldoon's insight:

We are at a formative moment in American education, and this report reflects the gravity of the moment. We must all work together tirelessly to make public education thrive in every community in this great nation. By rising to meet this moment, and by guaranteeing that each child is inspired and equipped to succeed, we safeguard America’s founding values and advance our competitiveness, our prosperity and our security. When public education is equitable, the dream of America endures.

Susan Ohanian Very thorough explanation of whose money and what forces are behind Common Core:

I scream about the topic sentence requirement in kindergarten and assigning As I Lay Dying, with its 15 narrators, in 11th grade; I mock the notion of such “informational text” as “Invasive Plant Inventory” and Euclid’s Elements (listed in Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, Appendix B) supplanting To Kill a Mockingbird and “Macbeth” as vehicles for conveying to students the world knowledge Common Core thugs insist is necessary to compete as workers in the Global Economy. And I’d scream just as loudly if every required text was a book I loved. All this arguing about the percentage of fiction allowed and what that fiction should be is a deliberate distraction thrown up by the power brokers. They do it with school reform; they do it with social issues. They want us to wage battle with each other–over the content of national standards–so we’ll have no breath left over to ask Who decides? Who’s in charge of public schools? And for whose benefit do they operate?

What Do We Know About Civic Education? Not Enough Huffington Post (blog) If you ask the average person in the United States today to describe how much civic education our students get in an average day, what students view as their role as citizens...

Jem Muldoon's insight:

"And if there is hope that civic education will get the attention it deserves in the nation's schools, then perhaps the body of research that looks at civics achievement and instruction and civic engagement in all schools will become more robust too. The current lack of research leaves the nation at a real disadvantage if we hope to understand and improve civic knowledge and engagement among students."

S.T.E.M. education inspiring girls nationwide MSNBC Host Melissa Harris-Perry was joined by an all-female panel on Saturday to discuss S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and its relationship to girls in our country.

Jem Muldoon's insight:

Watched the entire segment. what welcome news in an era of bad news in education.

For the last year a revolt against high-stakes standardized testing has been growing around the country, with teachers, principals, superintendents, parents and students speaking out about the negative impact on education of this obsession.

Huffington Post The Global Search for Education: If not the SAT, What? Huffington Post What if educators were able to assess the 21st century skills that thought leaders in The Global Search for Education series talk about week after week?

Jem Muldoon's insight:

"Multiple-choice questions require the ability to recognize a painting. In comparison, performance tasks require the student to paint. Definitions of learning have shifted to the ability to apply what one knows to new situations. Performance assessments capture this change. "

Progress Illinois Truths About Education That Parents Need to Know Huffington Post A six-year-old girl is excited about going to her neighborhood school.

Jem Muldoon's insight:

Last two paragrgrahs:

Education is overwhelmed with an allegiance to mandated curriculums and standardized testing. Students are tired and weary. Teachers must not think and create on their own -- they must follow the mandated path.

Many teachers, parents, and students are looking for someone to rescue them.

There is a better way -- a way that cherishes the processes of learning, interests, talents, and developmental needs in physical, social, emotional, and intellectual realms. This way allows students to love their studies and become engaged in ways that motivate them from within. We must present this paradigm and begin the rescue.

San Francisco Chronicle Education secretary: Start school later in day UPI.com "But at the end of the day, I think it's incumbent upon education leaders to not run school systems that work good for buses but that don't work for students," said...

Jem Muldoon's insight:

Finally! Research has shown that starting times should be switched, where elementary students start early and secondary students start later. So pleased to see this!

Recycled Assumptions: How Journalists Keep Education Tied to Damaging Ideas Huffington Post It very rarely happens that the cover of the New York Times Book Review, which represents some of the most prestigious intellectual real estate in the U.S.,...

Because of my interests, I want to include voices outside education. I don't believe that we need to require all students to take computer programming. I do think it is interesting that the author uses Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg in the same breath as Ashton Kutcher and Will.I.Am. So important for us to know what is being said.

Who Owns Student Data? InformationWeek FERPA explicitly prohibits disclosure of information contained in student education records absent consent from parents, or from students age 18 or older, if they are enrolled in any post-secondary educational...

Fortune (blog) Rethinking the online education revolution Fortune (blog) With $7.5 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Bessemer Ventures, Sankar, 32, aspires to play a key role in the transformation of education.

Jem Muldoon's insight:

"I'm a big fan of learning online. But we aren't being ambitious enough. If children in the developed world fall off the educational track, giving them computers is not going to help most of them. Education is more than lectures, assignments, and exams. It's a means to envision a different life from the one you're living. Let's give every student a shot at that."

Next steps toward achieving equity in education Washington Post (blog) for each I reported earlier this week on a new report on equity in education that was released by a congressionally mandated commission, and noted that it had some important...

Jem Muldoon's insight:

If the American public sees education as an investment in children and communities, then the educational policies of our nation must place a high value on a skilled and committed teaching profession. Americans must view teaching not only as a noble vocation, but one for which the preparation and compensation are commensurate with the challenges teachers and our children face. Just as our society expects the highly able, intensively-trained people to go into important professions such as medicine, so too should we expect the best and brightest to be the well-prepared teachers to whom we entrust our children. Our investment in this critical cause will ultimately contribute to a thriving 21st century economy that is driven by the graduates of excellent and equitable public schools.

The teacher voice is not heard at the policy-making table, because teachers speak in their native tongue. Policy makers have a language that loves "shovel-ready bullet points." Teachers know that issues around teaching and learning are more than test scores and dollars spent.

It's five minutes before the bell. My psychology students are reaching for their smartphones after our mini-field trip to the main campus library for an introduction to online reference materials.

Jem Muldoon's insight:

This is such a great departure from the Common Core push. It teaches students to make solid arguments, evaluate claims made. I appreciate how it will help students as they are faced with the Common Core and as they proceeed through life.

Disruptive Innovation Needed in Higher Education Huffington Post (blog) Example: An esteemed professional colleague of mine, Adam Karwoski, is a social media consultant to institutions of higher education.

Why education 'research wars' leave no winners Washington Post (blog) In a recent post, Kevin Drum of “Mother Jones” magazine discusses his growing skepticism about the research behind market-based education reform, and about the claims that...

Jem Muldoon's insight:

"But, one useful first step, at least in education, would be to stop pointing fingers and acknowledge two things. First, neither “side” has anything resembling a monopoly on the misuse of evidence. And, second, such misuse has zero power if enough people can identify it as such."

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